AACS bypassed in only 8 days?!
p2pnet.net news view:- This isn’t really news as no Technical Protection Measure (TPM) can protect against a motivated technical person with physical access to both the encrypted content and the decryption keys (embedded in the software/hardware). A note about this circumvention was sent to me by a technical person with the title, “Laws of Physics still stand”. The harder these systems are to circumvent, the more motivated people will be to do so for a variety of reasons – the majority of which have nothing to do with copyright infringement.
The Advanced Access Content System (AACS) is the new “DRM” system intended to be used in next generation for both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats, and likely more in the future.
One article described the task as only taking 8 days.
Remember: All it takes is a single person out of the 6.5 + billion on the planet to decrypt any encrypted content and then it can be shared online the same way it could if the encryption never existed.
With “DRM” any circumvention also tends to make a class of content available (IE: all movies that are viewable by a specific brand of players, or a specific player if unique device keys are used), which means that a single circumvention can make quite a bit of content available.
TPMs are not part of the solution for copyright infringement. In fact, by breaking the movies from playing on standard hardware, or breaking the hardware from being able to run software chosen by their owners, these so-called “copy control” provide a motivation to infringe copyright.
If circumventing a “DRM” to protect the property, privacy, security and other rights of the owners of the hardware is made illegal, then there’ll be no motivation to respect copyright.
[Also see Decrypt AACS movies - Ed]
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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December 30th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
MS Vista makes users jump through a zillion hoops like special crippled hardware and software in order to view “protected” content, for what? Adding encryption to this bus and that bus is absolutely RETARDED and a waste of human effort, especially when anyone with half a brain knows that any TPM is trivial to defeat.
This means “premium content” such as an HDDVD will be playable on a Linux machine with a simple software decoder. No muss, no fuss. Yet another reason to not be bothered with Vista-shit.
December 31st, 2006 at 3:30 pm
It is worth it for Microsoft as they are trying to create a platform monopoly. They want to have the copyright holders encode their content such that it only legally works on a Microsoft-controlled platform.
It appears worth it for the incumbent major labels, studios, etc because they aren’t thinking about the issue as rational business people. When they hear about copyright infringement they just “see red” and are making irrational decisions to fight against infringement. The fact that their solution is far worse than the problem, even to their own special interests, would require them to back up from their extreme emotions and think rationally.
For the average consumer they have no clue about these issues and how they impact them. They are still stuck in the world of incorrectly thinking that if your friends have Microsoft Office then you must also have a Microsoft setup in order to share documents with them. They buy computers as if they were toasters, not putting nearly the amount of thought into the more important software than the less relevant hardware. How much RAM is a bigger concern than what operating system.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:33 am
wow. 8 day? i have just one word. FAIL